The advance of high-speed mobile Internet and capacity of user devices, such as mobile phones, smartphones and tablets, has given rise to a new way of consuming mobile live video streaming services. There is also a high demand from users to record or film a social event, e.g. a football game or a music festival, in order to present the users' own version of storytelling.
However, not all the media content is allowed to be uploaded to distributing or streaming service providers, such as for live broadcast, due to copyright regulations and other digital rights of certain events. It is extremely difficult to forbid users in the audience from recording the event and distributing it. Instead of regulating the users, it is more practical to monitor the distributing or streaming service providers.
Current approaches mainly depend on copyright violation reports. For example, authorized media content distributers keep close watch on distributing or streaming service providers to detect any violation of media content distribution. If distribution of digital rights or copyright protected media content is detected, a request is sent to the distributing or streaming service providers to stop the media content distribution.
Another approach is to add watermarks to digital rights or copyright protected media content, which, later on, can be used for content identification. However, adding a logo or other watermark results in a degradation of user experience. Various watermarking techniques have been proposed in the art.
Color plane modification provides low visible watermarking by modifying different color planes of a digital media, such as the cyan, magenta, and yellow planes. This method is performed at post-record time. This type of watermarking would require performing the color plane modification at the different user devices. Hence, all user devices need to be modified in order to enable color plane modification. The watermarking type also costs processing power and time.
In masking the digital media, the digital media goes through a filter and a mask is applied to the visual content. The drawbacks are similar to the color plane modification, i.e. post-record time processing and power and time demanding. This type of watermarking also visibly degrades the digital media.
Distortion using invisible light prevents third parties from recording protected media content but does not actually provide watermarking. By introducing pulsing infra-red and ultra-violet waves into the environment, the protected media content seen by cameras is distorted. New modern cameras are, however, equipped with infra-red and ultra violet filters. Therefore this method is not applicable anymore. In a variant, distortion can be introduced by using visible light. The advantage is that modern cameras cannot bypass this distortion. The disadvantage is that the recorded media content is completely distorted, thereby significantly lowering the user experience.
WO 2014/179810 discloses watermarking the audio channel of a multimedia content. A limitation of such an approach is that audio metadata, such as watermarks, is very vulnerable to filtering and transcoding. Hence, such watermarks can easily be removed and filtered by an audio transcoder or compressor.
There is therefore a need for a technology to impose digital rights management and copyright protection onto video content uploaded from users recording a social event. It is in particular a need for such a technology that does not require modifications of the user devices used by the users to record the social event. The technology should not degrade the video content in such a way that the user experience when watching the video content is significantly lowered.